New York

On a dusty, slate-colored couch reeking of bong water and dirty laundry, Jeremy Couillard invites visitors to experience a multidimensional journey into the great beyond with Alien Afterlife, 2016–17. The installation’s centerpiece is a video game designed and engineered by Couillard, unfurling as a quest for reincarnation amid kaleidoscopic landscapes and eccentric extraterrestrials. When the player is killed, the game abruptly ends with a stern and graphic “NO!” Moments later, you are returned to a limbo/home-base level called the Mother, sans penalty, likely because the character was dead to begin with. The whole virtual experience is suffused with the comic absurdity of early-1990s first-person-shooter games such as Wolfenstein 3D and Doom but carves its own unique position within the genre as a metacritique of dimensional reality.

The gallery’s installation is living-room space culled from something between the neon cyberpunk motif of a William Gibson novel and Spicoli’s bedroom from the 1982 movie Fast Times at Ridgemont High. An empty bong waits patiently on the coffee table, and a number of dated smartphones, along with an iPad, display 3-D renderings designed by Couillard of exterritorial stoners lollygagging about time and space. In the dark, neon-lit basement below the gallery, the exhibition takes a startling turn as a pair of animatronic gray aliens clank away at laptops, communicating to one another via a localized chat room. At one point during the conversation one alien asks a pertinent question of the other: “What is your art about?” The response: “USB—Uncle Sad Bedroom.”